


Come, Let's Away to Prison

by captainjackspearow



Category: Bloodborne (Video Game)
Genre: Canon Compliant, Character Study, Found and Unfound Family, Gen, Not A Shipfic, Survivor Guilt, This includes Maria's original death so be warned, also some Crime Guilt, between the doll's maria dialogue and orphan's gehrman face and cry i couldn't NOT write this, i'm a fan of the 'Moon Presence capitalized on Gehrman's loss of his adopted daughter' theory
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-10
Updated: 2020-02-10
Packaged: 2021-02-27 23:21:44
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,059
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22644037
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/captainjackspearow/pseuds/captainjackspearow
Summary: The Paleblood pulls at Gehrman's strings, finds him workable and wanting, because they've both lost children to untimely deaths, to the murderous whims the other Great Ones inspire. Kos's orphan finds a bitter, unwelcome understanding in Maria's regret and slow-simmering fury, for they've both lost parent and life alike to the bloodlust of men.(The custodian of the dream and guardian of the nightmare are inextricably bound in grief. Yet, as often they see the other's haunting face, their counterpart remains as incomprehensible to them as the Old Ones themselves.)
Relationships: Gehrman the First Hunter & Lady Maria of the Astral Clocktower
Comments: 11
Kudos: 31





	Come, Let's Away to Prison

**Author's Note:**

> Finally finished a Maria fic. Took me long enough.

It’s like a dream: the fleeting yet perpetual kind one has on long, sleepless nights, tossing and turning in a feverish haze as the light of the moon seeps through fluttering eyelids.

The entity – _Flora_ – crafts an eerie simulacrum of his old workshop for him. He knows why she chose it. It was the only place in Yharnam that’s ever felt anything approaching safe, for him, at least, since it all started - the hunt, the plague, the long-lingering nights.

What he’s not sure is _why._ Why she even bothered, why she chose him, why she listened.

He thinks he comes to understand. At least, perhaps he does in part, as he spends countless murky nights in the stagnant embrace of perpetuity, watching the world turn and turn again from night to day to night, _always_ to night. The cycle repeats ad nauseum. A hunter slips between the cracks of the world, reaching a bit beyond their ken. He teaches them to live, as he taught all the others ( _dead and gone, dead and gone_ ), and sends them on their way again, eventually, to die.

As he kills, like he killed all the others, once they’d done her work for her.

After a while, he stops training them. Resigns himself to his dreary thoughts, to his small corner of the blooming garden, and prays sleep will grant him the reprieve that it never does. He will never understand this mad cycle, the length of the night, but it does not matter, as the doll hums over the graves of those he cut down and the simulacrum of the one he dug himself.

He will never understand. But the Paleblood understands him, because it knows what it feels like to lose a daughter.

***

It’s like a nightmare: a constant, pressing reproduction of past and imagined horror that plays out before one’s eyes, as they lie frozen in place, helpless to do anything but watch, to flail in vain against the inevitable, dreaded end or to surrender to it.

The wizened child cobbles the place together from a patchwork of her most haunting memories, saturating them through with its own baleful disdain. She knows why it did that, at least. Even while living, she could never shake the pungent smell of that village, of the blood soaked into her clothes, staining the carved grooves of her blade, eating away at the back of her mind like the pain of the truth.

But she’s not sure why she’s permitted custodianship over such a place, what it saw in her - a mere murderer like all the rest, though now bloodless and weighed down with the curse of regret.

She thinks she comes to understand. At least, perhaps she does in part, as she spends countless, timeless hours lingering in the darkest echoes of the past, watching the horror play out again and again before her fingertips. But the cycle repeats ad nauseum. A blood-drunk hunter slips through the veil, and she kills them for their killing, to send them on their way, so they live on ( _like she does, like she did_ ) and suffer for their crimes. The nightmare swells with poison, with blood, with delight-turned-regret and dark pride warped into the deep shame it ought always to have been. Tortured patients scream beyond her doors for sunflowers and painkillers and the lingering touch of a hand that recognizes them as something still capable of feeling.

She wonders if they’re even real, here, or just specters to haunt her. She will never understand the depths of this purgatory, the overwhelming level of committed atrocity, catalogued by something capable of marking every minute of it. But it does not matter, as she sits in the same chair she once slit her throat in, clutching a tiny golden sundial.

She will never understand. But the dead Kos understands her, or its orphan does, because they know what it feels like to die full of regret.

***

He chose to be part of the dream. He begged for it, took the Great One into his arms and his spine and the deepest recesses of his brain readily, surrendered himself to her will and reaped for her, men and infants alike, until he was so attuned to others’ loss that he could no longer remember what his own felt like.

He let her destroy that last piece of himself, because the world is full of cosmic wrongs, and to be given the capacity to put even some right is beyond a reward in the same way that no longer having to feel is.

***

She chose to be part of the nightmare. She never asked for any of it, but she held the blade true and drove it into the flesh on the shore, took the great one by the limbs and hacked away at it under duress until there was nothing left, until the corpse’s child wormed its way into her mind and her bones and those bloody hands like a ghost, held a stranger's blade fast against her throat, and stole any escape death might have to offer.

She let him destroy the last piece of herself, because what else when you’ve committed a sin so grand that it echoes far beyond the limits of the world as you could ever possibly hope to comprehend it?

***

He remembers Maria, and though the dream smooths the pain of her loss, the fact that he cannot forget her hatred haunts him even still.

The old workshop is serviceable for carving as well as bloodcraft and weaponsmithing. The moon helps him build the doll in her likeness, crafting each articulated finger joint from the very porcelain she would have scoffed at.

The un-born creature does not know who she is meant to be. She knows there are photographs of her likeness that hang, tucked into dusty corners of the building she can only call her home, that her face is merely half her own, but she keeps him companion anyway.

But she is a puppet, just as he is, and there is none of the best of Maria in her. Cold glass eyes do not have the rebellious glint he craves, glazed over instead with sleep and mourning of nameless, inevitable corpses. Ceramic hands lack calluses, the brutal consequence of forging one’s own path amidst a family that sought to shape her into a monster.

(The thought rises, unbidden, that she could have died on the thought that he was not so different from Cainhurst. He begs the moon to wash that pain from him too, and then he does not think on the matter again in his waking hours, and his dreams cease to weigh him down, once he rises.) 

There is none of Maria’s fire in her, he thinks, as she dons mourning clothes from a collection of garments crafted for the generic ideal of a proper lady that neither woman was, could ever have _been,_ even as the face she wears needles ceaselessly at old wounds.

Perhaps her face is his punishment, after all. A constant reminder, for trying to overwrite the memories of his child in place of her loss.

***

She remembers Gehrman, and though the nightmare drowns her in the sea of her former indifference, his absence in that place – his refusal to admit his crimes, her own – haunts her. Even as his face crops up, unbidden. 

When she sees the orphan’s face on the beach, in her mind's eye, burnt into the backs of her eyelids – _every time_ – it’s all him. The forsaken infant wears his old expression like a grotesque mask, like he knows exactly who it’s meant to be, because he _does._ The pain is split between the two of them. He knows there are memories of the man’s kindness tucked deep into the dusty corners of a mind that is anything but home to her, that will never be peaceful again. He knows that Gehrman’s violence and bloodlust is only half the man, but a too-late-acknowledged half is as good a whole as any, and he sears it into her mind even as she keeps her distance from him.

(It was the first and last glimpse of humanity that the Great Young One saw. The lack of compunction, the willful gutting of something innocent without a word. How could he know any different?)

But the orphan puppets his face, and all the worst of Gehrman is reflected back for her to bear witness to. The creature’s bloodlust reminds her of Gehrman’s, as it directs her hands to torture the torturers in turn, his grimace lingering somewhere just behind her shoulder.

Perhaps his face is her punishment, after all. A constant reminder, for refusing to see it earlier.

***

His nights are full of nightmares. He scarcely remembers them when he wakes, but what little that slips past the veil of moonlight into uneasy memory is this: himself, a monster. Haunted by his own face and the body of the creature they left behind. He – not _him_ – tells them to kill, to whet their blades on the blood of the guilty, faces he _recognizes._

It is gruesome and awful, even for the short time it lasts. But those who’d surrender themselves willingly end up dragged through his mind too, and perhaps that haunts him even more than the bloodshed – the idea that they mightn’t have held their blades with such certainty before he ever held his own to their throat.

***

Her languid days are full of strangely peaceful dreams. Death should have no dreams, and so she does not feel real, here, lost in strangely bland memories of the old workshop. Unfamiliar faces train and pass by, learning and leaving, and she runs her fingers across the carved letters of every name that eventually finds its way to a headstone.

It is peaceful while it lasts. But the fact that they will continue to commit the same crimes, meet the same end, or else cut the others down, send them to her - will be forced to hold a blade in at least _one_ hand - haunts her nonetheless.

***

The Paleblood demands ascension, demands transcendence, demands the abortive reproductive cycle continue and continue and _continue_ until they get it _right._

Kos’s orphan demands retribution, demands they admit to the world and themselves what beasts they truly are, demands the incessant punitive cycle continue and continue and _continue_ until they _understand._

(Though the Old Ones don’t, they know that they never will.)

***

He comes to realize he’s fought all this time for her, in an odd sense. The Paleblood puppets him like it puppets the doll. Those who would not be satisfied with the end of their own cycle of grief – that of the cosmos – must admit that that they are nothing more than puppets themselves, like _he_ is, for the murderous Great Ones.

She fights for his sake, though she’d never admit it. Kos’s orphan would have her board up the memory of the hamlet, denies her the peaceful death she admits she never deserved, should never have hoped to seek. She fights those who would not be satisfied with the knowledge they gained, who profited from spilt blood and would do so still, for they must admit that lethal curiosity can only be cured with an honest death, that they are nothing more than puppets – like _she_ was – of bloodlust, who’d kill the Great Ones.

***

His death, when it comes at the hands of another child who will not listen, sets him at an uneasy peace.

The nightmares are over, but he will never again be haunted by her face, sweet falsehood that it was, in his waking dream. 

(But he’d begged the moon to see it, and so his haunting at the hands of his one-time child was a punishment of his own folly, when it granted his selfish wish.)

***

Her death, when it comes at the blade of another hunter seeped in poisonous curiosity, sets her at an uneasy peace.

She will no longer daydream of him, but she will never again be haunted by his face, painful truth that it was, in this timeless nightmare.

(But she begged death to take her once, and so the act of dying, the failure to protect the child as she once did the parent, is a punishment of her own folly, when it ultimately _does_.)

**Author's Note:**

> Title is from 5.3 of King Lear, from Lear's last speech to Cordelia before his initial failure to listen to her costs Cordelia her life. Primarily because this speech mimics the same lack of understanding between the father and daughter, and *this* instance kills the both of them in the end, as Cordelia is hanged on orders set in motion by Lear's actions.
> 
> But also, because what Lear ultimately plans to do in prison is to ponder the mystery of the cosmos like "God's spies." This fantasy of Lear's spans the rise and fall of kingdoms and "sects of great ones that ebb and flow by the moon." So, double appropriate.


End file.
